This invention relates to control of rodents and similar animal pests. Control of such pests is highly desirable because such animals tend to carry disease and/or parasites, tend to contaminate food, tend to feed upon and destroy crops, tend to enter homes and other buildings, and to feed on food and other valuable items in the buildings.
The number of rodents which may infest an area presents the opportunity to use substantial quantities of bait toxic to such animals in order to stock a bait station for several days of feeding.
There have been proposed a number of bait stations which generally house a toxic bait, keeping the bait out of the ambient environment in order to avoid degradation of the bait by rain water or other atmospheric conditions. When bait is placed in such bait stations, the animal enters the structure in order to be able to reach and feed on the bait.
The bait used in such structures may be a pelletized product which is easy for the animal to pick up and eat. It is also known to use such pelletized bait by placing the bait in an open container such as a shallow tray, a cup, a bowl, an open box, or the like.
A problem encountered with use of pelletized baits is that the animals for which such bait is intended, such as voles, mice, rats, and the like tend to carry food, which they don't need for immediate consumption, to a storage location away from where the food was found. Accordingly, one of the drawbacks to using a pelletized bait in a bait station is that the animals tend to carry some of the bait away, such that a portion of the bait placed in the bait station is stored rather than being consumed. And so that portion of the bait which is carried away does not contribute to solving the objective of eliminating as many of the animals as possible as soon as possible.
In order to counter the tendency for the animal to carry the food away from a bait station, manufacturers of such toxic baits have provided the bait in chunk form, both as generally cubic blocks and as elongate blocks of bait, sometimes called bait sticks.
Especially the smaller cubic blocks are small enough that a determined animal can still carry away a block, or at least a portion of the block, when a significant portion (e.g. half) of the block has been consumed. While it is known to use the smaller cubic blocks in an enclosed bait station, with any use of cubic blocks, the situation can in fact be worse than use of pelletized bait because a larger piece of bait (larger than a pellet) can, at some point in the consumption of the block, be carried away by an animal.
However, the larger blocks do present a benefit in that a greater quantity of the bait must be consumed before an animal is able to carry away the remaining portion of the block.
It is also known that animals can dislocate, dislodge a bait station from a desired location, either moving the bait station from the desired location or tipping the bait station into an unusable orientation.
There is a need, therefore, for animal bait stations to be securely anchored to an underlying soil surface, and to provide access for the animal to be able to reach the toxic bait, and to prevent, or at least impede, the animal from removing large chunks or blocks of the bait from the bait station.
The bait station should also confine the bait to an interior portion of the bait station, and the entrance to the bait station should be sized in order to limit access to the bait to the small animals for which it is intended, thereby to make difficult, or impossible, entry or access by other than the pest animals for which the bait station is intended. Thus, the bait station structure should be such that children cannot easily access the bait in the bait station.